§ Statement of Purpose

The View from 1776 presents a framework to understand present-day issues from the viewpoint of the colonists who fought for American independence in 1776 and wrote the Constitution in 1787. Knowing and preserving those understandings, what might be called the unwritten constitution of our nation, is vital to preserving constitutional government. Without them, the bare words of the Constitution are just a Rorschach ink-blot that politicians, educators, and judges can interpret to mean anything they wish.

"We have no government armed with the power capable of contending with human passions, unbridled by morality and true religion. Our constitution is made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." John Adams, to the Officers of the First Brigade, Third Division, Massachusetts Militia, October 11, 1798.

Liberal-progressives, enraptured by the pagan environmental gospel of Al Gore, have campaigned to put petroleum producers and coal miners out of business To do so requires killing the free market, in which consumers have overwhelmingly demonstrated their preference for the opposite.

Green energy is a form of production controls, price control (raising taxes on petroleum and coal producers) and federal and state subsidies in a vain attempt to make green energy competitive by raising the price of traditional fuels.

One rationalization for federally-mandated green energy is the need to reduce reliance upon foreign sources of petroleum. This is arrant nonsense. Recent shale gas discoveries, as well as continuing discoveries of huge of oil deposits such as Exxon-Mobil’s recent one in the Gulf of Mexico, demonstrate that we already have more than a century’s supply of oil and natural gas, if the government will allow production to proceed.

If green energy policy is forced down our throats, as Democrat/Socialist Party leaders in Washington and states like California demand, there is real danger that we will freeze in the winter, broil in the summer, and go hungry as crops fail for lack of water, enough farm land, and diminished cultivation. People in the upper-income brackets may be able to afford battery-powered automobiles (made possible only by federal mandates and subsidies to auto makers), but the average citizen will be much less mobile than today.

To have sufficient, reliable green energy capacity, we would have to cut down almost every tree in the nation to cover the landscape with wind turbines and cover the deserts with solar panels. Hydro-electric power is out, because dams interfere with snail darters and salmon migration. Even solar panels are mightily resisted, because they interfere with the habitat of variety of desert rat. And to grow enough corn for ethanol, there will be little arable land left for food production, turning the nation into a net importer of food crops.

The ultimate irony is that many green energy projects consume more energy than they produce, and all of them reduce consumers’ standard of living.

There is a precedent for such willful destruction, imposed on the general public by intellectual planners. Russia, before 1917, was one of the world’s largest exporters of grain. Under Soviet control, the nation no longer grew enough to feed its own citizens.

Liberal-Progressivism Flops Again

Thomas Sowell writes that Obama’s new New Deal is suffering the same failures as FDR’s New Deal, for the same sorts of reasons.

Quote:

As unusual as 9 percent unemployment rates may seem to the current generation of Americans, unemployment rates stayed in double digits for months and years on end during the 1930s. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration followed policies very similar to those of the Obama administration today. He also got away with it politically by blaming his predecessor.

Sunday, August 28, 2011

Bernanke’s Bailout Of Foreign Banks

As I have written several times since July, the only real beneficiaries of massive intervention by Obama and the Fed are Wall Street stock brokers and the giant banks. A column in the August 27, 2011, New York Times by Gretchen Morgenson (one of the few Times reporters who has any understanding of financial markets and business) seconds that position.

Walker F. Todd, a research fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research and a former assistant general counsel and research officer at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland [as well as a long time board member of the Committee for Monetary Reform and Education], said these details from 2008 confirm that institutions, not citizens, were aided most by the bailouts.

A Provocative Thesis

Hedge fund traders had a great year in 2008. That year, hedge fund short sellers were instrumental in the spike in fuel prices, the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, the banking crisis, and the stock market collapse. While extremely wealthy hedge fund traders engineered each of these calamities, and made billions of more dollars short selling each one, the American people collectively lost trillions of dollars in the value of their homes and savings.

And, as amazing as it is, no one went to jail. Why? Well, perhaps it is because in 2007 the perpetrators had some laws changed to their liking. And perhaps it is because these people are politically connected to the Obama Administration and Congressional liberals. Our government is protecting them, and there needs to be a public investigation into this matter.

The hedge fund short sellers who were at the root of the mayhem are found primarily at the Managed Funds Association (MFA), the so-called

The Unity Of The Constitution And The Scottish Enlightenment

Liberal-progressivism - in all its manifestations from Soviet Communism, to European socialism, and Hitler’s National Socialism - is founded in the repeatedly disproved theory that intellectuals can restructure political society in ways that will perfect human nature. Philosophers of the Scottish enlightenment and those who crafted our Constitution were firmly and correctly certain that human nature has always been the same and will remain unchanged.

Considering The Alternatives

Obama’s Keynesian interventionist policies clearly have made economic conditions worse. What would have happened if he had made no interventions, as last happened in the deeper recession of 1920-21? What if he had done as Paul Krugman advocates and expanded his deficit spending an additional $6 to $8 trillion?